Family Law/Estate Planning

Where a judge granted temporary custody of a child to the Department of Children and Families, a single justice did not err in denying a G.L.c. 211, §3, petition for extraordinary relief filed by the child's mother.

Where, in an appeal from an order by a judge of the Probate & Family Court for substituted judgment, an incapacitated person’s father and attorney maintain that the judge should have sought live testimony from medical personnel, the judge did not err as a matter of law in making his determination that the incapacitated person is being kept alive only because of a shunt or drain, that upon removal of the shunt or drain, he will die in a matter of days, that he has no conscious thought, that he can probably feel pain and that he would not wish to live in such a state.

Attorneys who practice any level of estate planning are, at this very moment, standing on hallowed ground. To understand why, we must go back in time, ironically to just a few months prior to 9/11. On June 7, 2001, Congress ...

Where plaintiffs brought suit seeking an order requiring the defendant attorney to return $68,000 in fees allegedly paid to the attorney by the plaintiffs’ late father at the behest of the plaintiffs’ sister (the codefendant) who was the father’s guardian, the complaint was correctly dismissed based on the plaintiffs’ lack of standing to sue on behalf of their father’s estate.

Where a judge awarded a divorced father physical custody of the parties' younger child, ordered him to pay alimony in the amount of $405 a week and ordered the wife to pay him child support in the amount of $170 a week, the alimony and child support components of the judgment must be vacated because of errors by the judge.

Where a judge denied a divorced mother’s claim for $2,200 in retroactive child support, the judge’s decision must be reversed based on evidence that, contrary to the ex-husband’s assertion, the couple’s daughter was enrolled in college.